After reading the article about a 13 year old girl quitting social media, I found some things I agree with and some things I disagree with. First of all, I agree with how she made it a rule that her mom and sister couldn’t post about her online anymore unless they had her permission to do so. I understand this because I know I hate it when my mom tags me in bad photos of me on Facebook and then it shows up on all of my friends pages to see. I think that she made a smart and reasonable request of her family. However, there are also a few things that I felt were blown out of proportion. In the article, the girl got so worked up over old photos of her, like photos of her as a toddler. I personally found this unreasonable because it’s not like her friends were on Facebook as fellow toddlers to see these “embarrassing” pictures of her. In most cases, embarrassing stories and photos become funny ones after some time has passed. I for one am thankful that my mom basically documented my entire childhood on Facebook because I can also go back and look at all of the memories my family and friends had together from when I was young.
I googled myself to get a sense of what my online presence was. When I went to images, I had to scroll down a ways until I found a photo of myself, which was one of my senior pictures I got done at the end of my senior year in High School. I don’t find it embarrassing or in any way inappropriate to have out for the world to see, I’m actually glad that's the first thing that comes up about me. I have a Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat, Pinterest account and many other forms of social media that I post many pictures on so I was shocked when I could only find one photo by searching my name. However, I realized that a lot of my accounts aren't under my full name Delaney, they’re under what my friends call me, Del. Oddly enough, not a single photo of me came up when I searched Del Wilson either. After various searches of not finding anything about myself, I tried googling my Instagram username and that brought up a few photos, but now many recent ones. It pulled a photo of me from last summer which is my twitter profile picture, my current instagram profile picture, another senior picture, two old selfies from three years ago, and a lot of pictures of my friends Instagram and Twitter profile pictures. I thought it was weird that photos of my friends alone came up when I searched my name, so I tried searching my friends' names to find pictures of me. Sure enough, tons of photos that I’m in show up, mostly pictures from high school like football games or proms. Overall, I am very happy with my online presence. I didn’t find anything embarrassing or disturbing about myself online.
I think that social media as a whole has done great things for us as a society. Of course everything has its downfalls, and social media can have a negative effect when people abuse it or get too attached to it, but overall I find it very positive. It is a great way to stay connected with people, create new connections, create a brand for yourself, and organize your memories. I think that social media does an amazing job at bringing people together, especially in times like this. Due to corona, I can’t see any of my friends or extended family so social media is the only thing we have to keep eachother updated about our lives and how we are doing. Without social media people would be much less connected.
A lot of people nowadays are concerned about their privacy, but I honestly am not that worried. To me, I don’t see how invading my privacy benefits anyone. My privacy is essentially worthless to anyone of power. A common worry is people who say Apple can read all of the texts you send. Well, what texts are you sending that Apple would actually care about? What texts are you sending that anyone outside of your friends and family or the person receiving the text would actually care about? Even if Apple or the government are invading my privacy, I have nothing of value to them, so frankly I don't care if they are. Most of the “private”information they collect is used to help us anyways. For example, we all know that Instgarms listens to you whenever you have the app open so that it can find your keywords and promote more relevant ads to you. I appreciate it because it shows me ads for things that I actually care about. I don’t really see all of this as an “invasion of privacy”, but I understand how many people may feel different.
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